“You’re allowed to need help, Jett.”
“I don’t need help. I need December.”
“And if December doesn’t fix it?”
“It will.”
“But if it doesn’t.”
I grabbed the notice off the counter and shoved it into the junk drawer. “Then I’ll figure it out. The way I’ve been figuring it out since I was twenty-one and started this business with nothing but a laptop, a contact list, and zero safety net. I didn’t have a tech salary to fall back on. I didn’t have parents who could float me a check. I built this from the ground up, and I’ll keep building it even when it’s slow.”
The kitchen went quiet.
Ellis looked at me. His face had gone still in that way I’d learned to recognize. Not shut down, but absorbing. Processing the thing underneath the thing I’d actually said.
“This isn’t about the electric bill,” he said.
“It’s absolutely about the electric bill.”
“It’s about you feeling less than me because I make more money.”
The accuracy of it, the surgical, unflinching accuracy, made me want to leave the room. Leave the apartment. Take the subway to somewhere he couldn’t find me and sit with the ugly truth of it alone, the way I’d always processed ugly truths: by myself, in motion, at a distance.
“My mom cleaned offices.” Something went quiet in my voice. The heat gone, replaced by something flatter. “Three buildings, six nights a week. She put me through school on that. Bought my first laptop on that. Never asked anyone for anything because asking meant owing, and owing meant someone had power over you.”
“I’m not trying to have power over you.”
“I know. But the feeling doesn’t care what you’re trying to do.”
We stood on opposite sides of the kitchen. Four feet of linoleum felt like a class divide. Him with his stable salary, his 401k, his parents’ house on Long Island where he’d never worried about the lights going off. Me with my hustle and my pride and my mother’s voice in my head saying, “You don’t take handouts, mijo, you earn your way.”
Even when she wasn’t speaking to me, she was still the loudest voice in the room.
“I’m going to say something and you’re going to hate it,” Ellis said.
“Go ahead.”
“Accepting help from someone who loves you isn’t the same as losing. It’s the same as letting someone carry the grocery bags when your arms are full.”
“That’s a terrible metaphor.”
“I know. I’m an engineer, not a poet.”
I almost smiled. Almost. The fight was still there, simmering under my ribs, but the edge had dulled. Because he wasn’t wrong. And because the man standing across from me had cooked me dinner a hundred times, held me through the worst phone call of my life, let me name his plants, and none of that had ever made me feel less than.
Only the money did. Because money was the one language my pride refused to translate.
“Fine,” I said. “Cover the electric bill. But I’m paying you back in December. Every cent.”
“Deal.”
“And you don’t get to feel good about it.”
“I already feel good about it.”
“Ellis.”
“I’m paying your electric bill and I’m happy about it. Sue me.”
